Review: San Andreas

Story:

The Rock vs. An earthquake.

Review:

It’s every predictable disaster movie I’ve ever seen. Right up to the Rock being estranged form his wife and she’s moving on with another man. I wonder how that will turn out. And his daughter is far away and isolated and they have to go save her.
It’s a very entertaining movie I’ve just seen this before. The Rock’s always likable though and he’s good in this. A lot better than other main characters I’ve seen in disaster movies. All the other characters did fine too. There was no one who was terrible.
The special effects were very good. You believe those buildings are collapsing and the entire street is moving like a wave.
The biggest problem I have with it is it tries to take itself too seriously. The scientist guy is a fine character but I don’t need him to science babble up a reason for why it’s happening. I just want to watch the Rock saving people from destruction (which is another problem I’m going to talk about in a bit). And ultimately the scientist guy’s story goes no where. An evacuation happens because of him but I don’t think it did that much.
So the Rock is playing a guy who saves people from dangerous situations and that’s how he’s able to go save his daughter. It makes it plausible because he’s got a helicopter and lots of saving people skills. The only problem is he ignores everyone else in order to save his daughter.
I think he saves one other person in the movie after the earthquake starts that’s not family. As he’s flying in his helicopter to go save his daughter all I’m thinking is aren’t you on call or something. Isn’t it your job to save all those people back there in that ruined city. He saves his wife from the rooftop and doesn’t even try to help anyone else. He’s not much of a hero.
The other problem is that the movie seems to think it needs a bad guy. Or that we need a bad guy to hate. We don’t, there’s enough conflict with the earthquake. We never need a bad guy in these sorts of movies. And if you’re going to have a bad guy he needs more screen time and to be a hindrance to the heroes. Otherwise there’s no point to him. The end of his story was predictable but amusing. At least they tried to make him a person at the beginning instead of the evil caricature he turned into.
The ending is good but stretched my suspension of disbelief too far.
Then we get the funniest scene in the movie as the camera pans across the destruction and a lone American flag unfurls. I laughed out loud. I know American’s are patriotic and the flag was everywhere after 9/11 but this seems a strange place to put it. Did the earthquake insult America?
Overall I enjoyed myself and it was fun movie. All the standard disaster movie tropes didn’t make it an awful movie but I think it’s only worth seeing if there’s nothing else to watch.
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